In his classic discussion of inheritance customs and practices in the thirteenth century, published over forty years ago, G. C. Homans gave much attention to the relationship between the rural family and its land in the areas of impartibility that coincided with ‘champion’ England. His reflections on the areas where partible inheritance prevailed were, by contrast, brief and confined mainly to evidence of Kentish gavelkind. He did, nonetheless, use the Kentish findings as a basis for more general remarks about multigeniture that were, he believed, applicable to medieval East Anglian society, where he noted there was considerable evidence for partible inheritance on both socage and customary land.

Homans, considering Kentish gavelkind, assessed the likely differences in social organization stemming from practices on the one hand which allowed or encouraged co-heirs to subdivide their inheritances and to hold their shares individually and from those on the other which led to the co-heirs living together in common. He believed that Kentish families of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries ‘must have resembled those that still existed in Auvergne, the Nivernais, and other parts of France in the nineteenth century: descendants of a common ancestor living in one large house or in a small group of adjoining houses and holding a domain in common and undivided’. In fact, Homans preferred to stress the prevalence of what he termed ‘joint-family organisation’ in these areas.